The ruling classes, immersed in the life-and-death struggle with France, had no remedy. Their sole cure for economic stresses and strains was to leave them to the laws of supply and demand; the Home Secretary's advice to a delegation of unemployed Stockport weavers was to be patient. To starving workers unaware of the teachings of economic philosophers, such a policy seemed heartless inertia. Illiterate and helpless, they turned in their anger on their employers—the only representatives of power with whom they were acquainted—and against the machines which had brought wealth and opportunity to these ambitious men and ruin to themselves. Napoleon's decrees and American policy were outside their cognisance. But the machines, which did the work of ten men for the wages of one, were within their reach.
Towards the end of
1811
riots broke out in Nottinghamsh
ire, where unemployment had been aggravated by the collapse of a speculative market in revolutionary South America. Mobs of starving framework-knitters, calling themselves Luddites, openly assembled in every village to break the machines which robbed them of their livelihood. When the Government to restrain them sent down a brigade of dragoons—urgently needed in the Peninsula— they continued their operations by night. The trouble spread to the neighbouring counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire. By the spring of
1812
to conservative minds the whole of the manufacturing districts of the North and Midlands seemed engaged in a gigantic conspiracy. Men with blackened faces handed anonymous threats to machine-owners, factories were gutted, arms seized from householders and militia depots. While Wellington's men were storming Badajoz, their countrymen in the West Riding and Lancashire were engaged, with axes, hammers and muskets, in battering down the doors of moor-side mills under the fire of their equally pugnacious and stubborn owners.
To all this society's only answer was repression. A military camp was formed in Sherwood Forest, the yeomanry were called out, watch committees were set up and special constables enrolled. More troops were used that spring to hold down the manufacturing districts than had been sent in the original expeditionary force to Portugal. Cavalry patrolled the disaffected districts night and day, spies were employed to track down the ringleaders, and Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offence.
1
More than forty rioters were sentenced to death at special Assizes and as many transported.
Yet any weakness might have been fatal. But for the Government's firmness England could easily have failed its army in the hot, restless summer of Salamanca. While the country was at war with a militant revolution that had overthrown every State in Europe, a rough and illiterate populace, rendered desperate by suffering, had taken the law into its own hands. The reports of the Home Office spies were full of allusions to mysterious agitators, midnight drillings, and sanguinary Jacobin resolutions. There was no police force, and even the loyalty of the Militia was uncertain. On May nth,
1812,
the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in the House of Commons. Though it subsequently turned out that his murder had nothing to do with industrial unrest, the savage joy with which it was greeted by the hungry workers of the North terrified the rest of the nation.
2
In the new manufacturing towns—a neglected, nightmare world cut off from the ancient civic and rural polity of England —the ruling classes had become intensely unpopular.
The little group of Pitt's disciples, who under Perceval and his successor, Lord Liverpool, were carrying on the Administration, made up in courage and common sense for what they lacked in brilliance. They were practical men who loved their country and, though they had made mistakes, learnt from them. They both dealt firmly with violence and refused to be stampeded into defeatist economic measures which, though agreeable to the theories of pedants and most of their own class, might have destroyed England's ability to wage war. When a Parliamentary Committee on currency reform, presided over by the Whig Horner, attributed the country's economic plight, not to the closing of Europe's and America's ports, but to the inconvertibility of her enlarged paper money, and proposed as remedy a deflationary resumption of cash payments, Castle-reagh, as Leader of the Commons, and Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, refused to accept it. Had they done so the run on the country's dwindling gold might have brought trade to a standstill and even forced the recall of Wellington's army from Spain. It was
1
Hansard,
XXI, 603,
et seq.
Byron made his maiden speech in the Lords against the measure. "Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons?" he asked. "Will you erect a gibbet in every field and hang up men like scarecrows?" Moore,
Byron,
157.
2
Wilberforce,
IV, 29. See also
Two Duchesses,
364; Colchester, II, 394-4035 Dyott, I, 299; Scott, III, 112; H. M. C. Bathurst, 188; Dudley, 151-2; Lord Coleridge, 201; Bury, I, 92; II, 285; Shelley, I, 8-9. At the execution of his murdere
r, the hangman was pelted. Alde
rson, 20.
not the first time that Ministers, in their resolve for victory, had defied economic theory to keep the wheels of industry turning. When the first wave of bankruptcy was sweeping the industrial areas, they had boldly resisted the growing restriction of currency by advancing six million pounds free of interest to embarrassed traders.
The opening of the ports of Russia and of her ally, Sweden, brought about a resumption of exports in the nick of time. So long as the French were advancing on Moscow and St. Petersburg this revival of trade was precarious, but when in October it became known that the Russians were fighting on and the French were in retreat, it was as though a great weight had been lifted. "Glorious news from the north," w
rote Walter Scott on December 10
th,
"
per
eat
iste
"
Men could not at first believe it. When Napoleon's flight to Paris and the destruction of his army became known at Cambridge, the Fellows of Trinity leapt on the tables, danced, sang and hugged one another; "you never saw such a scene," Adam Sedgwick told Montague Butler many years afterwards, "and you never will!" A grateful Parliament and country joined in voting funds and subscribing to the Russian National Relief Fund; even Wellington's veterans in their cantonments along the Portuguese border contributed their pennies and celebrated by impromptu dancing to the strains of "The Downfall of Paris,"
1
With the Baltic
open and a prospect of Europe liberatin
g itself England once more put forth her full strength.. By the spring of
1
813
the export entries at the Leith Customs were hi
gher than ever in their history.
That year, with a population of less than
13
millions in the United Kingdom and 5 millions in I
reland, Britain subsidised the
armies of every State in Europe willing to rise against Napoleon. Her expenditure rose to
£118
,000,000—nearly
five times its prewar figure—£68
,000,000 of it raised out of current taxation.
And after twenty years of war her Government knew how to use her strength. Composed of men whom clever folk regarded as mediocre, it represented the nation's continuing resolve to win. All but two of them still in their forties, they were Pitt's pupils. To his
1
"Bravo Russians!" wrote Simmons of the Rifles. "They are worthy of the country they inhabit!" Simmons, 270, 278. See Bury, I, 102; Costello, 158; Dudley, 179, 183; Gomm, 291; Tomkinson, 291; Letter to
Times
by J. P. Bidder, Jan. 20th, 1943; Colchester, II, 413-14; Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
222;
Paget Brothers,
252;
Peel,
I, 41.
inflexible will they had added, through bitter experience, a tough horse-sense and a knowledge of the fundamental rules of war. They had learnt to concentrate. "Bonaparte has conquered the greatest part of Europe by doing but one thing at a time," wrote the Master-General of the Ordnance to the Secretary for War, "and doing that with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his strength. If you succeed in the Peninsula, nothing of yours will go on ill elsewhere; if you fail, nothing will go on at all anywhere else."
1
As the news of Napoleon's Russian disaster spread across the
world, Ministers staked everyth
ing on success in Spain. Disregarding the possibility of invasion, they kept back only 25,000 regulars to guard the British Isles.
The Peninsular campaign of
1813
was planned against the background of a new war beyond the Pyrenees and Alps. In the last days of the old year, while the remnants of the
Grande Armee
were trying to rally on the Vistula, General Yorck, in command of its Prussian contingent, concluded an armistice with the Russians. Though at first repudiated
by
King Frederick William, who was still mesmerised by Napoleon, it was received with wild enthusiasm by every patriot. Six weeks later the Prussian king, surrendering to popular clamour, signed an alliance with the Czar at Kalisch. On March 4th, Cossacks entered Berlin as the French fell back to the Elbe. Twelve days later Prussia declared war on France. On the 25th, in a joint proclamation, the Russian and Prussian sovereigns summoned all Germany to rise.
Meanwhile Napoleon had called up half a million more conscripts. Many were lads of sixteen: France was reduced to its last man and horse. But, though the possessing classes had lost all faith in him, the Emperor's resolution rallied the nation for one last great throw. He rejected his Austrian father-in-law's offers of mediation, refused to withdraw his troops from a single fortress in eastern Europe and made it clear that he would accept nothing less than his full former authority.
To provide cadres for his new army Napoleon again ignored Wellington. In the teeth of the evidence, he chose to assume that the latter had only 30,000 British troops.
By
recalling the remaining units of the Imperial Guard and drafts of veteran non-commissioned
1
Mulgrave to Bathurst, Oct. 7th, 1812. H. M. C. Bathurst, 216.
officers and men from every regiment in Spain, he reduced his forces there to little more than 200,000 effectives. The only reinforcements he sent to Spain to replace the heavy casualties of 1812 were boys. Many of them, unable to stand the hardships of the march, died on the road.
Already, though the British had scarcely fired a shot since the autumn, King Joseph was in trouble. So strong was the guerrilla stranglehold on his communications that the news of the retreat from Moscow took a month to travel from the Pyrenees to Madrid; Napoleon's return to Paris on December 18th only became known to Joseph on February 14th. After Wellington's triumphs of the previous summer the Spanish partisans were past holding. They behaved no longer as outlaws but as men certain of victory, and the whole country was either behind them or terrorised into acquiescence. In Navarre the great guerrillero, Mina, levied taxes and maintained a personal army of eight thousand; in February, with the help of guns landed from British ships, he forced the French garrisons at Tafalla to surrender. One of his detachments stormed the castle of Fuentarrabia on the frontier, threw its armament into the sea and made a funeral pyre that was visible far into France. Every village along the trunk roads had to be garrisoned, every church and farm made a fortress. To reach its destination a French dispatch needed a regiment, sometimes a brigade in escort.
In the opening months of 1813, while Germany was arming, the long Spanish War of Independence reached its climax of ferocity. A French officer told a British prisoner that there was scarcely a family in France that was not in mourning for it. It was a struggle in which yellow fever and typhus played their part: a shadow war pictured in Goya's cartoons of disaster—the women raped in the broken mill, the squat, brutal troopers with their vulture faces, the haggard peasants mutilating their captives with axe and knife or facing, with despairing eyes, the levelled guns of the firing squads; the burning town, the rifled tomb, the atrocious vengeance; the naked corpses transfixed to charred lintel or broken tree; the famine-stricken fugitives with skull-like heads and match-stick limbs; the vampire forms of men and women transformed by hatred and terror into the likeness of beasts. The struggle had set its impress on the campaign long before the British guns began to rumble over the stony roads towards the French frontier. On March 17th, 1813, Uncle Joe—"the King of the Bottle"—left Madrid for ever. On Napoleon's orders he took up his headquarters at Valladolid and dispatched half his field-forces to hunt down guerrillas in the valleys of Biscaya and Navarre. Clausel with the Army of the North and almost the entire infantry of the Army of Portugal was sent to chase Mina out of Navarre, Foy with another corps to pacify the Biscayan coast. In their attempts to restore their communications, Joseph and his master reduced the forces facing Wellington to little more than 50,000 men.
The British army had no guerrillas to hunt: the people of Spain were its friends. And with the centre and south now liberated, it was all concentrated in the north within fifty miles of the Leon plain. Thanks to the fine work in emptying the hospitals of James McGrigor, the chief of the Medical Staff, there were more men with the colours than there had ever been before. All that winter and spring the roads to Portsmouth and Plymouth had been full of troops bound for the Peninsula: jangling Household Cavalry with splendid accoutrements and fresh, beefy faces, the spoilt "householders" of army jest; reserve battalions marching to join their consorts; detachments of rosy-cheeked militiamen under raw young ensigns "in fine new toggery," the drums and fifes playing before them and the village boys running beside, while housewives at their cottage doors mourned over the poor lambs going to the slaughter, and the confident young soldiers, not knowing what was coming to them, jested back. Thence, drawn by the invisible strings of Wellington's design, they crossed the Bay and saw for the first time the barren, tawny shores of the Peninsula, felt the stones and smelt the stink of Lisbon town, and marched out of Belem barracks on the long mountain track to the frontier. When, bug-bitten, .footsore and dusty, they found themselves among the tattered, cheery veterans who were to be their comrades, their education began. "Do you see those men on the plain?" barked old Major O'Hara of the Rifles to the latest batch of "Johnny Newcomes" as they looked down from their rocky fastness. "Es, zur." "Well, then, those are the French and our enemies. You must kill those fellows and not allow them to kill you. You must learn to do as these old birds do and get cover where you can. Recollect, recruits, you come here to kill and not be killed. Bear this in mind; if you don't kill the French, they'll kill you!"
1
Every fresh arrival was ruthlessly probed by the old hands for weak
1
Costello, 70. See
also Johnny Newcome,
16, 18, 30, 151; Bell, I, 3-5, 79; Simmons, 124, 232; Grattan,
Zii-12\
Kincaid,
Random Shots,
238.